1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic documents processing, to the manipulation of files attached to electronic documents, and more particularly, to systems and methods for tracing files detached from electronic documents.
2. Related Art
There are many software applications capable of attaching copies of files to electronic documents. Examples of such software systems include, but are not limited to, electronic mail systems, database systems and Web browsers. Collaborative systems, such as Lotus Notes (Lotus Notes® and IBM are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in certain countries), support the inclusion of files as e-mail attachments as well as attachments on documents stored in Lotus Notes® databases. By means of a browser, such as Internet Explorer from Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft® is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in certain countries), a user can detach (or download) a copy of a document from a Web page on the Internet to the user's system local storage.
It is noted that attachments can be of any type of data such as images, graphic or text documents, spread sheets, mp3 files or programs. For instance, most of electronic-mail systems support RFC 822 (from Internet Engineering Task Force Request For Comments) which describes the STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET TEXT MESSAGES that is a part of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), e-mail standard protocol. This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent among computer users, within the framework of “electronic mail”. This standard has been completed by RFC 1521-MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies. MIME allows messages to incorporate non-text content (e.g., any type of file attachments) while still remaining compliant with RFC 822.
Using the preceding software, users accessing a file attached to an electronic document can detach the file to a local system for further processing. For example, on Lotus Notes a file attached to a document stored on a Lotus Notes® or Domino® database (Domino® is a trademark of IBM Corporation in certain countries), or attached to a note or memo on the Lotus Notes® mail Inbox, can be either viewed with a file viewer, launched or processed by another application, or detached from the electronic document and stored to be later on locally processed or executed, if the detached file is a program.
As a common practice, to save data storage space on server and client systems, file attachments are not kept permanently attached to the electronic documents. Instead, they are usually detached, and local copies of attached files are created.
To detach a file from an electronic document and create a local copy of the attached file, the user typically (as in Lotus Notes®), highlights the file to be detached, selects a “detach” option, and interacts with a “file save” interface to specify a filename for the local copy of the attached file and the location (i.e., the folder) to which the file is to be detached. On those conventional systems, when a file has been detached or removed from an electronic document, the file icon is replaced by a textual reference to the detached or removed file, and to the date and the author of this operation, like by example:
**** Attachment Berry-January.gif has been removedfrom this note on Feb. 10, 2004 by John Friday ****
This way to detach files has the advantage of automatically creating and keeping a trace in the electronic document of the file which has been detached or removed from it. This answers a general problem of automatically keeping a trace of a link between an electronic document and a file which has been detached from it.
A different approach is exemplified by a utility named “Detach Remove and Link” described on the IBM's developerWorks site, on:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/fe7542cd3b120e1b00256c38004a6a27?OpenDocument
This is basically a LotusScript® agent applied to save space in mail databases by allowing the user to detach attachments, insert a link to the detached file, and then remove the attachment(s) from a document.
However, these solutions only solve partially the problem of automatically keeping a trace of a link between an electronic document and a file which has been detached from it. As a matter of fact, if the source mail from which a file has been detached is removed from a mail log, the file name or the link is lost and the link between the detached file and its source document cannot be recovered. The posed problem is thus: How to identify that a given file stored on a user's storage, has been obtained by detaching it from a particular mail, or from a particular electronic document in a database, or from a Web page accessed by a browser, even when the source document has been removed from the system ?.
If the user has decided to create a repository of files detached from e-mails on a personal computing system, in the course of one year, hundreds of files may have been typically received by a user, these files having been received as attachments of e-mails from many different senders. Those files are usually detached by the user, and stored on folders, from where occasionally, they may be accessed by the user, reviewed and attached to new documents, or to outgoing e-mail, being redistributed to many people. At any moment, the user needs to identify the sources of those detached files (e.g., to ask the sender for further or related information, or for updated versions), even when the source e-mails from which those files were detached would be deleted, or lost.